James Berya Opiyo

God is ❤️. Curious, optimistic realist. All things Life, Philosophy, Petroleum, Nanotechnology, Renewable Energy, Architecture, Engineering & Construction.

[James Berya Opiyo @BeryaJames]

Always privileged to share the steady progress of Tilenga Project as the building blocks are put together.

[TotalEnergies Uganda @TotalEnergiesUG]

@BeryaJames, Our Interfaces Manager, presented the current phase of project development for the #TilengaProject.

Enabling Infrastructure:
✍️Industrial Area​ Site preparation​ (Mota Engil). Overall progress reached 99.8% by the end of June 2024.
✍️Mota Engil has completed the handover of all the CPF platforms, OSB+OC, and GNA05 well-pad section.
✍️N1 Access Road complete. Work on all 12 internal roads completed.
✍️External drainage. Retention Pond 1 works are underway, and close to completion. #CreatingSharedValue
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[James Berya Opiyo @BeryaJames]

@DelightCajo @UniversityLeeds I like how well you represent Ug...very proud of what you keep doing, @DelightCajo .

[Messi archive 🇦🇷 @messi_archive10]

"Football in Messi's presence found it purest voice"

I don't know what to say to you if you still think there's any footballer greater than Messi. He is the best ever and there will NEVER be another player like him. ♥️🐐

[David Sejusa, DM. @sejudav]

We need to applaud our leaders when they get it right. So Thank you Your Grace! Btw, WHY CAN'T GOVERNMENT PAY ITS INTERN DOCTORS? I have been trying to understand it clearly: Why can't Government find money to pay a few thousand intern doctors? WHAT IS THE LOGIC? Because it is not the money as the Archbishop correctly points out. If you have Shs 200bn to spend on cars for People, many, who even FAILED THE ARTS you are refusing to pay for now, how can you FAIL TO FIND just Shs 28bn for 2000 INTERN DOCTORS?

WHAT IS THE LOGIC? Refusing to pay ARTS TEACHERS and you Pay SCIENCE TEACHERS MORE, produce the SCIENTISTS AT THE UNIVERSITY, then refuse to pay THESE SCIENTISTS, BUT INSTEAD PAY THE ARTISTS, even HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUTS(MPs) with Shs200bn FREE CARS? BTW, WHY DO WE GIVE FREE CARS TO MPs WHO EARN SHS 50 MILLION PER MONTH? WE WHO STRUGGLED WITH BLOOD AND SWEAT, AND THOUSANDS DIED TO BRING ABOUT THAT PARLIAMENT; THEY DON'T BUY CARS FOR US; AND WE DON'T DEMAND! We buy our own Cars. And those who can't, THEY USE TAXIS! So what is it with these POLITICAL FREELOADERS?

Here is my take: Either the People in charge are SUBVERSIVE; ie, silent enemies of the State, or they are extremely ignorant and incompetent! So, which is which? The GOVERNMENT has placed SCIENCE STUDY at the centre of the EDUCATION SYSTEM. I hear the President drumming it up daily. They even increased Salaries of Science teachers tenfold, and abandoned Arts teachers, etc. And in this endeavour, many young people are taking Science subjects: Medicine; Engineering; Food Science; AI, Environmental Science, etc.

Take THESE INTERNS/Doctors. The biggest field, perhaps second to ARITIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE(AI) today is BIOTECHNOLOGY AND PHARMACOLOGY. There is so much going on in these areas which deal with the application of BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS AND ORGANISMS to make and use things like VACCINES, GENE THERAPY,etc, which are central in the quest for DISEASE ERADICATION. The Bridging of the gap between LABORATORY RESEARCH and PATIENT CARE is now the bedrock of GLOBAL HEALTH CARE SYSTEMS. So why would government not support people who are key in such fields; i ask again, WHAT IS THE LOGIC?

[James Berya Opiyo @BeryaJames]

Proudly associated 🙏

[TotalEnergies Uganda @TotalEnergiesUG]

Designed to deliver 190,000 barrels of oil per day, the #TilengaProject is Uganda’s flagship oil & gas development, operated by @TotalEnergiesUG, in partnership with @UNOC_UG and CNOOC Uganda Limited.

At its heart is one of East Africa’s largest & most complex industrial projects, the Central Processing Facility (CPF). Located within an Industrial Area spanning ≈700+ Acres, about 80–85 football pitches, the CPF itself covers approximately 163 Acres and is located in Kasenyi village, Buliisa District.

Here, crude oil from +420 wells will be processed and prepared for export. +8000 are involved in delivering the project, 80% of these are Ugandan!
#CreatingSharedValue

[James Berya Opiyo @BeryaJames]

@LindaNEK @CSIS @MaxwellSU Congratulations, @LindaNEK ! Onward & upward only!

[Jack Prandelli @jackprandelli]

🇹🇿Tanzania is about to finalize one of the largest energy deals in African history.

Equinor, ExxonMobil, and Shell are meeting in Dar es Salaam this week for the final round of negotiations on a $42 billion LNG project.

The hard part is already done... Commercial terms agreed and Tax framework settled.
What's left is turning the handshake into legally binding contracts.

💡Tanzania sits on massive offshore natural gas reserves that have been waiting for development for over a decade.

This project would build the infrastructure to liquefy that gas and export it globally creating one of Africa's largest LNG export hubs.

Right now the world is desperately hunting for LNG supply outside the Gulf(Qatar mainly)
Tanzania is about to enter that market with $42 billion of committed infrastructure and 3 of the most credible operators on earth behind it.

Another node on the new energy map and one that bypasses Hormuz entirely.

[Tech with Mak @techNmak]

In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood.

Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively.

That paper - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", became the founding document of the digital age.

The man was Claude Shannon. Father of Information Theory.

At 21, he wrote the most important master's thesis of the 20th century.

Working at MIT on an early mechanical computer, Shannon noticed its relay switches had exactly two states - open or closed. He had just taken a philosophy course introducing Boolean algebra, which also operated on two values: true and false.

Nobody had ever connected these two things.

His 1937 thesis proved that Boolean algebra and electrical circuits are mathematically identical, and that any logical operation could be built from simple switches.

Howard Gardner called it "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century."

Every digital computer ever built traces back to this insight.

At 29, he proved that perfect encryption exists.

During WWII, Shannon worked on classified cryptography at Bell Labs. His work contributed to SIGSALY, the secure voice system used for confidential communications between Roosevelt and Churchill.

In a classified 1945 memorandum, he mathematically proved the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy, unbreakable not just computationally, but provably, permanently, against an adversary with infinite power.

When declassified in 1949, it transformed cryptography from an art into a science. It laid the foundations for DES, AES, and every modern encryption standard.

At 32, he defined what information is.

His 1948 paper introduced one equation:
H = −Σ p(x) log p(x)

Shannon entropy. The average uncertainty in a probability distribution. The minimum bits required to encode a message.

Three things followed:

> He defined the bit - the fundamental unit of all information. His colleague John Tukey coined the name.

> He proved the channel capacity theorem, every communication channel has a maximum rate of reliable transmission. You can approach it. You can never exceed it.

> He unified telegraph, telephone, and radio into a single mathematical framework for the first time.

Robert Lucky of Bell Labs called it the greatest work "in the annals of technological thought."

Where his equation lives in AI today:

Cross-entropy loss - the function training every classifier and language model, is derived directly from H. Decision tree splits use information gain, which is H applied to data. Perplexity, the standard LLM evaluation metric, is an exponentiation of cross-entropy.

Every time a neural network trains, Shannon's formula runs inside it.

He also built the first AI learning device.

In 1950, Shannon built Theseus, a mechanical mouse that navigated a maze through trial and error, learned the correct path, and repeated it perfectly. Mazin Gilbert of Bell Labs said: "Theseus inspired the whole field of AI."

That same year he published the first paper on programming a computer to play chess. He co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, the founding event of AI as a field.

The man:
He rode a unicycle through Bell Labs hallways while juggling. He built a flame-throwing trumpet, a rocket-powered Frisbee, and Styrofoam shoes to walk on the lake behind his house.

He called his home Entropy House.

When asked what motivated him: "I was motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together."

In 1985, he appeared unexpectedly at a conference in Brighton. The crowd mobbed him for autographs. Persuaded to speak at the banquet, he talked briefly, then pulled three balls from his pockets and juggled instead.

One engineer said: "It was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference."

He died in 2001 after a decade with Alzheimer's, the cruel irony of information slowly leaving the mind of the man who defined what information was.

Claude, the AI model, is named after Claude Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the digital world we rely on today.

[James Berya Opiyo @BeryaJames]

@mtnug please address my query in your DM. It's urgent.

[James Berya Opiyo @BeryaJames]

@bluemontauk Your mate Paul deserves an award 😀. This clip is as funny now as when I first watched it. It keeps giving.

[James Berya Opiyo @BeryaJames]

Great to see Ugandan languages overrepresented in this dataset. Kudos to the @Makerere team supporting this initiative 👏

[Google Research @GoogleResearch]

Learn more and check out the WAXAL dataset here: https://t.co/uPM535byzp

[Math Cafe @Riazi_Cafe_en]

"Everything You Wanted To Know About Mathematics"

PDF at: https://t.co/dQJ2c1rVJd

[Ⓜ️ᴀʀтᴀ @capable_youth]

@turnedwife Alysa Liu is the definition of "art with a soul." Her performance wasn't just a show; it was a beautiful expression of joy and talent.💛

[James Berya Opiyo @BeryaJames]

@OrtegaTalks 😀

[James Berya Opiyo @BeryaJames]

@ClarenceAkagu @bluemontauk 😁🤣🤣

[bluemontauk @bluemontauk]

OMG, she is hilarious!! 🤣💀

[SETI Park @seti_park]

https://t.co/qEVcV60VHl

[Solomon King #FreeBesigye @solomonking]

Wait.

You guys attacked Solomon Kampala because of the language he used because his mother is being assaulted by the state and his father is in hiding?

Are you serious?!

[James Berya Opiyo @BeryaJames]

@HEBobiwine 😥😥

[James Berya Opiyo @BeryaJames]

Super-insightful discussion here on the Alpha School model of education. Kids learning 5x as much in 20% of the time compared to traditional education. Great nuggets motivating kids that can very well be applied to adults.

[Johnathan Bi @JohnathanBi]

Nothing has made me more optimistic about our AI future than visiting Alpha School.

The dominant doomer narrative is that, even if we solve alignment, AI will automate so much that humans will be left with nothing but meaningless hedonism. As AI does more and more humans are reduced to less and less.

Alpha School shows us that there exists an alternate path where human potential is realized, not truncated, by AI and where work becomes more meaningful.

I shadowed Alpha’s co-founder MacKenzie Price (@mackenzieprice) for a week and was blown away by what I saw. They’ve replaced all of their human teachers with AI tutors that are able to offer bespoke, custom instruction to each student — the same kind of tutorship previously reserved for the aristocracy now scalable through technology. Her students spend only 2 hours a day on academics and yet consistently score 99th percentile in standardized testing and go on to study in the best colleges in the world.

But what about teachers who now have all lost their jobs? They are hired as “guides” who dedicate all of their time to understanding and motivating their students instead of grading papers on the same basic material over and over again. For many, AI has freed them to spend more time on what attracted them to teaching in the first place — building human connection and inspiring the next generation.

In this interview, we dive deep into Alpha’s philosophy and gain insight into the perennial questions in the philosophy of education:
- Can virtue be taught?
- Does nature overpower nurture?
- What is the relationship between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation?

Timestamps:

1:54 Our Education System is Obsolete
9:10 AI Tutors, 10x Learning
23:38 Confidence Can Be Taught
36:33 Universities In The Age of AI
40:14 How to Get Kids to Love School
42:22 External vs. Intrinsic Motivation
54:20 We Pay Kids Cold Hard Cash
1:02:13 Kids Want More School

[James Berya Opiyo @BeryaJames]

@bluemontauk